Gigabyte unveiled a new socket AM3+ motherboard targeting a price-point sweetspot, the 990FXA-UD3 1.2. The board is based on the AMD 990FX + SB950 chipset, and supports the upcoming AMD FX processors apart from socket AM3 processors in the Phenom II and Athlon II series. As a new revision, the board supports AMD FX processors out of the box. The AM3+ socket is powered by an 8+2 phase VRM. The board is constructed according to the UltraDurable 3 Classic specifications, with 2 oz copper-layer PCB, 50,000+ hours capacitor durability, and DualBIOS. The socket is wired to four DDR3 DIMM slots supporting dual-channel DDR3-2000 MHz memory with overclocking.

There are four PCI-Express x16 slots on this board, however, only two of them are wired to the AMD 990FX northbridge, both run at full PCI-Express 2.0 x16 bandwidth at all times. The other two are electrical PCI-Express x4, wired to the SB950 southbridge. The board supports both NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossFireX, though it's likely that it will ship with just the 2-way SLI bridge cable.

Other expansion slots include two PCI-Express x1, and one legacy PCI. All six SATA 6 Gb/s ports from the southbridge are assigned as internal ports, there are two eSATA 3 Gb/s ports, driven by a JMicron JMB363 controller. There are four USB 3.0 ports, two on the rear panel, two via a standard header, driven by Etron EJ168 controllers. Other connectivity includes 8 channel HD audio driven by Realtek ALC889 codec, one gigabit Ethernet connection by Realtek RTL8111E, and FireWire. The board makes use of traditional AwardBIOS, with HybridEFI extensions that lets you boot from volumes bigger than 2.2 terabytes.

So the only difference from v1.1 is that they've removed the two eSATA 6Gb/s on the back panel and replaced two of the USB2.0 ports with USB2.0/eSATA 3Gb/s combo ports, along with putting the second IEEE 1394 port on the back panel with the other one?

Huh ? It is ... dark ... and ugly, like a pile of ash or charcoal What happened to the color-keyed schemes which allowed one to locate the relevant connections and/or slots without much fuss once the board was inside the enclosure ?